Another Romanian hacker arrested for breaching NASA servers

An unemployed 26-year old who goes by "Iceman" has been charged with causing a …

A 26-year old Romanian hacker has been arrested for damaging computer systems at NASA, according to a release from the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT). Robert Butyka is charged with breaking into an unspecified number of servers at NASA starting in December of 2010.

NASA has become something of a reputation-building target for Romanian hackers. In an unrelated security breach in May of this year, another Romanian hacker claimed to have stolen classified satellite data from servers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. That hacker, who calls himself TinKode, posted screen shots from an FTP server related to NASA's SERVIR Earth observation program, which provides data to relief agencies and other humanitarian organizations. And in 2008, another Romanian, Victor Faur, was convicted in Romania of hacking NASA and US Navy sites in 2005 and 2006. He avoided jail time, but was fined $238,000 to compensate the US for damages.

Romania has no extradition treaty, so the case is being brought against Butyka under Romania's own anti-hacking laws. According to a report from Lucian Constantin of IDG News Service, Butyka is an unemployed self-taught hacker who went by the online name of "Iceman," and a resident of the western Romanian city of Cluj. He's being held for 24 hours with a court hearing pending to determine if his pretrial detention will be extended. DIICOT alleges that he caused over $500,000 in damage to NASA systems through "introduction, modification and damage to computer data, and restricting access to data."

The damages are calculated based off of the PR work needed to be done, the actual securing of the holes exploited, and altogether soothing their own egos because their It security was shown to be incompetent, right?

This is a bit sad. I may have a naive point of view, but NASA is probably the last organization that deserves this. Anybody cares to explain what was that guy looking for? Hidden plans for making wormholes? ICBMs? Lulz? Attention?

This is a bit sad. I may have a naive point of view, but NASA is probably the last organization that deserves this. Anybody cares to explain what was that guy looking for? Hidden plans for making wormholes? ICBMs? Lulz? Attention?

There's an urban legend here(Romania), or at least I think it's an urban legend, that two blokes broke into NASA servers and one day men in black stopped them while they exited the building of their college with the proposal of either working for NASA or going to jail.

According to the myth they accepted the job offer and were offered $10k a month. That's it; personally I think it's just someone wild fantasy at work here.

There's an urban legend here(Romania), or at least I think it's an urban legend, that two blokes broke into NASA servers and one day men in black stopped them while they exited the building of their college with the proposal of either working for NASA or going to jail.

According to the myth they accepted the job offer and were offered $10k a month. That's it; personally I think it's just someone wild fantasy at work here.

This is a bit sad. I may have a naive point of view, but NASA is probably the last organization that deserves this. Anybody cares to explain what was that guy looking for? Hidden plans for making wormholes? ICBMs? Lulz? Attention?

How the hell do you do half a millions worth of damage like that? Did he cause a satellite to fall from orbit or something?

Easy. You compromise scores of systems and then the cleanup (reinstall of OS, apps and all configurations since the environment is now absolutely untrusted) is measured in terms of cost of downtime, manpower for cleanup, etc. Additional costs would include things such as insurance hikes, additional security requirements to hopefully help the environment, and so forth.

EDIT: and of course the cost of sorting out what offsite backup data is good, and what is potentially bad/unsafe before ever planning your restorations. Now imagine you have to do this in 10 datacenters across the US.

Sounds like we need to send Aaron Barr to Romania to clean this mess up.

(Somehow the movie Get Smart comes to mind)

Maybe we should just hire the Romanian mafia to make them disappear.

Romanian Mafia is more economic rather than the violent, Italian style. Romania is an oasis of relative "peace" compared to neighboring Bulgaria,Serbia and Ukraine.There are in Romania an US navy base at the Black Sea and a significant part of US' ICBM shield scheduled for installation next year so there will likely be some extradition treaty signed sometime into the future. It was never a serious need for one maybe, who knows.

Looks like somebody still gives a fuck about NASA... too bad it's not the american people :)))

And about an extradition treaty with my country... as far as I know out relationship with Washington is so well lubricated that DIICOT would probably have just packaged him in box and shipped him to DHS regardless of the nonexistent extradition treaty if they woul have just cared enough to ask for him... sigh.

The young generation of Romania strongly believes that if they somehow manage to hack some remote NASA server, the second day they will be hired by NASA for a huge wage. This started by the time the first news about Romanians hacking NASA servers appeared in the media. The problem here is that all the kids dream of doing this, and there is nothing that can make them understand that this is not the way of getting hired by NASA (or anyone, really). The only thing that this can guarantee is a huge fine and/or extensive jail time.

I hope that NASA will start improving the security, because, in my opinion these guys won't stop anytime soon.

Oh, and I agree with nnq... The guy is probably being unboxed right now in a DHS basement...

There's an urban legend here(Romania), or at least I think it's an urban legend, that two blokes broke into NASA servers and one day men in black stopped them while they exited the building of their college with the proposal of either working for NASA or going to jail.

According to the myth they accepted the job offer and were offered $10k a month. That's it; personally I think it's just someone wild fantasy at work here.

LOL!

Anyone who has actually done any work for NASA knows there is no way this is possible. NASA is the king of red tape and low salaries. Everyone there gets paid according to this schedule:

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.